Spitzer Space Telescope

A dragon-shaped cloud of dust seems to fly with the stars in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope . In visible light the creature disappears into the clouds perhaps it's "frolicking in the autumn mist" like Puff, the Magic Dragon, from the famous Peter, Paul and Mary song.

The infrared image has revealed that this creature, a dark cloud called M17 SWex, is forming stars at a furious rate but has not yet spawned the most massive type of stars, known as O stars.The stars and gas in this region are now passing though the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way, touching off a galactic "domino effect." It takes an infrared view to catch the light from these shrouded regions and reveal the earliest stages of star formation.

The bottom image is a three-color composite that shows infrared observations from two Spitzer instruments. Blue represents 3.6-micron light and green shows light of 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's infrared array camera. Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's multiband imaging photometer. The bottom visible light image is a composite of visible-light data from the Digitized Sky Survey from the UK Schmidt telescope. The image combines two observations that represent the blue and red light from the region.

Cassini to Dive Low through Titan Atmosphere

As American schoolchildren head out to pools for a summer splash, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be taking its own deep plunge through the Titan atmosphere this week.

The altitude for the upcoming Titan flyby, whose closest approach occurs in the evening of July 6, Pacific and Eastern time be about 125 kilometers higher than the super-low flyby of June 21. The altitude of this flyby 1,005 kilometers is still considered a low dip into Titan's atmosphere. Cassini will not go lower again until May 2012.

During closest approach, Cassini's ion and neutral mass spectrometer will be sniffing out the chemical composition of Titan's atmosphere to refine estimates of the densities of nitrogen and methane there. The radar instrument will be mapping an area south of the dark region known as Senkyo and the Belet sand seas. It is an area that had not been well studied by radar until this flyby.

Because the geometry of this flyby is similar to the previous one, the magnetometer and other instruments measuring the magnetic bubble around Saturn will be conducting similar experiments. Though the magnetometer will be too high to detect any whisper of an internal magnetic field from Titan which was the focus of the search on the last flyby scientists will be looking into the interaction of Titan's atmosphere with the magnetic bubble around Saturn

The Coolest Stars Come Out of the Dark

Astronomers have uncovered what appear to be 14 of the coldest stars known in our universe. These failed stars, called brown dwarfs, are so cold and faint that they'd be impossible to see with current visible-light telescopes. Spitzer's infrared vision was able to pick out their feeble glow, much as a firefighter uses infrared goggles to find hot spots buried underneath a dark forest floor.

The brown dwarfs join only a handful of similar objects previously discovered. The new objects are between the temperatures of about 450 Kelvin to 600 Kelvin (350 to 620 degrees Fahrenheit). As far as stars go, this is bitter cold -- as cold, in some cases, as planets around other stars.

These cool orbs have remained elusive for years, but will soon start coming out of the dark in droves. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which is up scanning the entire sky now in infrared wavelengths, is expected to find hundreds of objects of a similarly chilly disposition, if not even colder. WISE is searching a volume of space 40 times larger than that sampled in the recent Spitzer study, which concentrated on a region in the constellation Boötes. The Spitzer mission is designed to look at targeted patches of sky in detail, while WISE is combing the whole sky.

Pacific Ocean sea surface

"The central equatorial Pacific Ocean could stay colder than normal into summer and beyond. That's because sea level is already about 10 centimeters (4 inches) below normal, creating a significant deficit of the heat stored in the upper ocean," said JPL oceanographer and climatologist Bill Patzert. "The next few months will reveal if the current cooling trend will eventually evolve into a long-lasting La Niña situation."

A La Niña is essentially the opposite of an El Niño. During a La Niña, trade winds in the western equatorial Pacific are stronger than normal, and the cold water that normally exists along the coast of South America extends to the central equatorial Pacific. La Niñas change global weather patterns and are associated with less moisture in the air, resulting in less rain along the coasts of North and South America. They also tend to increase the formation of tropical storms in the Atlantic.

"For the American Southwest, La Niñas usually bring a dry winter, not good news for a region that has experienced normal rain and snowpack only once in the past five winters," said Patzert.

Astronomers Discover Star-Studded Galaxy Tail

"The gas in this galaxy is being blown back into a turbulent wake," said Janice Hester of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, lead author of a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "The gas is like sand caught up by a stiff wind. However, the particular type of gas that is needed to make stars is heavier, like pebbles, and can't be blown out of the galaxy. The new Galaxy Evolution Explorer observations are teaching us that this heavier, star-forming gas can form in the wake, possibly in swirling eddies of gas."

Collisions between galaxies are a fairly common occurrence in the universe. Our Milky Way galaxy will crash into the Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years. Galaxies tangle together, kicking gas and dust all around. Often the battered galaxies are left with tails of material stripped off during the violence.

The astronomers were able to find this tail with the help of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. Clusters of massive, young stars speckle the tail, and these stars glow with ultraviolet light that the space telescope can see. The young stars tell scientists that a crucial ingredient for star formation - dense clouds of gas called molecular hydrogen - formed in the wake of this galaxy's plunge. This is the first time astronomers have found solid evidence that clouds of molecular hydrogen can form under the violent conditions present in a turbulent wake.

JPL's Next Mars Rover Landing Radar Tested at Dryden

Testing for the JPL-managed Mars Science Laboratory or MSL project included suspending a full-scale engineering model of the MSL rover from a helicopter and flying pre-planned flight trajectories over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards to simulate the rover's descent stage carrying the rover to the surface of Mars. JPL engineers needed to verify that the radar will provide accurate altitude and velocity measurements at Mars and that the suspended rover will not confuse the ability of the descent stage's radar to accurately calculate the rover's descent speed for a safe, on-target landing.

"Dryden offers a unique location to perform testing of this kind," said Carrie Rhoades, the Dryden flight operations engineer managing the MSL project at Dryden. "We have restricted airspace and a large dry lakebed that is useful in simulating several Mars-like features. Dryden is also conveniently close to JPL, so troubleshooting the system and fixing any issues has been relatively easy to accomplish," she said.

ASTSAT Satellite Readies for Shipment to Alaska

The pre-shipment review was completed in May, demonstrating the flight hardware has successfully passed all environmental and performance tests and is authorized for shipment to the launch site for final integration on the Minotaur IV launch vehicle, built and operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

Engineers will pack the satellite into a shipping container for delivery in early July to the launch complex in Kodiak, Alaska. FASTSAT is scheduled to launch no earlier than Sept. 1, 2010.

Mission operations for FASTSAT and all six experiments will be managed from the newly configured small satellite control room at the Huntsville Operations and Science Control Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

"An outstanding team of engineers and scientists worked diligently to get us to this milestone," said FASTSAT Project Manager Mark Boudreaux at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. "We are ready to perform the remaining activities, ship the spacecraft to Alaska and integrate FASTSAT on the launch vehicle."

FASTSAT will be flying on the STP-S26 mission -- a joint activity between NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense Space Test Program, or DoD STP. FASTSAT and all of its six experiments flying on the STP–S26 multi-spacecraft/payload mission have been approved by the Department of Defense Space and Experiments Review Board.

"The outstanding work and accomplishments from the FASTSAT Team illustrate joint activities at their finest," said U.S. Air Force Col Stephen D. Hargis, DoD STP director at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. "This is a clear example of what is possible when NASA and the Air Force put their minds together for a common goal…mission success and maximizing access to space."

One of the six experiments on the FASTSAT bus, NanoSail-D, is designed to demonstrate deployment of a compact solar sail boom system that could lead to further development of this alternate propulsion technology and FASTSAT's ability to eject a nanosatellite from a microsatellite -- while avoiding re-contact with the FASTSAT satellite bus. NanoSail-D, managed by the Marshall Center, will be the first NASA solar sail deployed in low-Earth orbit. It was designed and built by NASA engineers at Marshall in collaboration with the Nanosatellite Missions Office at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. This experiment is a combined effort between the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and the Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation, both located in Huntsville, and NASA.

Hubble Images Suggest Rogue Asteroid Smacked Jupiter

Without warning, a mystery object struck Jupiter on July 19, 2009, leaving a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The spot first caught the eye of an amateur astronomer in Australia, and soon, observatories around the world, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, were zeroing in on the unexpected blemish.

Astronomers had witnessed this kind of cosmic event before. Similar scars had been left behind during the course of a week in July 1994, when more than 20 pieces of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The 2009 impact occurred during the same week, 15 years later.

Astronomers who compared Hubble images of both collisions say the culprit may have been an asteroid about 1,600 feet (500 meters) wide. The images, therefore, may show for the first time the immediate aftermath of an asteroid, rather than a comet, striking another planet.

The Jupiter bombardments reveal that the solar system is a rambunctious place, where unpredictable events may occur more frequently than first thought. Jupiter impacts were expected to occur every few hundred to few thousand years. Although there are surveys to catalogue asteroids, many small bodies may still go unnoticed and show up anytime to wreak havoc.

“This solitary event caught us by surprise, and we can only see the aftermath of the impact, but fortunately we do have the 1994 Hubble observations that captured the full range of impact phenomena, including the nature of the objects from pre-impact observations” says astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., leader of the Jupiter impact study.

In 2009 Hammel’s team snapped images of the debris field with Hubble’s recently installed Wide Field Camera 3 and newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The analysis revealed key differences between the two collisions (in 1994 and 2009), providing clues to the 2009 event. Astronomers saw a distinct halo around the 1994 impact sites in Hubble ultraviolet (UV) images, evidence of fine dust arising from a comet-fragment strike. The UV images also showed a strong contrast between impact-generated debris and Jupiter’s clouds.

Spacecraft Burns for Home, Then Comet

spacecraft has successfully performed a trajectory correction maneuver to refine its orbit prior to an upcoming Earth flyby June 27. The maneuver, along with the Earth flyby, will place the spacecraft on a trajectory to fly past comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4.

The maneuver began at 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) today, when the spacecraft fired its engines for 11.3 seconds. While the burn changed the spacecraft's velocity by only 0.1 meters per second (less than a quarter mile per hour), that was all the mission's navigators requested to set the stage for an Earth gravity assist on June 27.

"While it was a small burn, it was a big step in getting us to Hartley 2," said Tim Larson, project manager of NASA's Epoxi mission. "Humanity's fifth close-up view of a comet is less than five months away."

Epoxi is an extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft. Its name is derived from its two tasked science investigations -- the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI) and the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh).

The University of Maryland is the Principal Investigator institution. JPL manages Epoxi for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

Small Near-Earth Object Probably a Rocket Part

Scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have determined that a small object that safely passed Earth on May 21 is more than likely an upper-stage of a rocket that carried a spacecraft on an interplanetary trajectory.

"The orbit of this object is very similar to that of the Earth, and one would not expect an object to remain in this type of orbit for very long," said Paul Chodas, a scientist at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Observations by astronomer S.J. Bus, using the NASA-sponsored Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, indicate that 2010 KQ's spectral characteristics do not match any of the known asteroid types, and the object's absolute magnitude (28.9) suggests it is only a few meters in size.

2010 KQ was discovered by astronomer Richard Kowalski at the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey in the mountains just north of Tucson, Ariz., on May 16. Five days later, it made its closest approach to Earth at a distance just beyond the moon's orbit. The object is departing Earth's neighborhood but will be returning in 2036.

"At present, there is a 6 percent probability that 2010 KQ will enter our atmosphere over a 30-year period starting in 2036," said Chodas. "More than likely, additional observations of the object will refine its orbit and impact possibilities. Even in the unlikely event that this object is headed for impact with Earth, whether it is an asteroid or rocket body, it is so small that it would disintegrate in the atmosphere and not cause harm on the ground."

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them, and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

Hubble Finds a Star Eating a Planet

The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

The planet, called WASP-12b, is so close to its sunlike star that it is superheated to nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit and stretched into a football shape by enormous tidal forces. The atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times Jupiter's radius and is spilling material onto the star. The planet is 40 percent more massive than Jupiter.

This effect of matter exchange between two stellar objects is commonly seen in close binary star systems, but this is the first time it has been seen so clearly for a planet.

"We see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system," says team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain.

Crews Opening Rassvet Hatches, Preparing for Spacewalk

The hatches between the International Space Station and its new Russian Rassvet module were opened for the first time at 5:52 a.m. CDT Thursday.

Also known as Mini-Research Module 1, Rassvet is almost 20 feet long, 7.7 feet wide and weighs 11,188 pounds. Carrying almost 6,500 pounds of internal and external cargo to the station, Rassvet has eight science work stations and will be used both as a docking and stowage compartment.

Mission Specialists Mike Good and Reisman prepared for their Friday spacewalk, configuring tools and preparing suits and the airlock. The major task of the spacewalk is to replace the final two of the six batteries being changed out on the Port 6 truss. Four were replaced Wednesday. Spacewalkers also will install an ammonia jumper and take a power and data grapple fixture from Atlantis’ cargo bay into the station. It will be installed later on the Zarya module, to provide a base for the station arm to work in that area.

The crew got about four hours of afternoon free time, until the spacewalk procedure review near the end of their workday. The spacewalkers will spend the night in the Quest airlock with its pressure reduced to 10.2 to psi.

Final Attempts to Hear from Mars Phoenix Scheduled

PASADENA, Calif. -- From May 17 to 21, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will conduct a fourth and final campaign to check on whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has come back to life.

During that period, Odyssey will listen for a signal from Phoenix during 61 flights over the lander's site on far-northern Mars. The orbiter detected no transmission from the lander in earlier campaigns totaling 150 overflights in January, February and April.

In 2008, Phoenix completed its three-month mission studying Martian ice, soil and atmosphere. The lander worked for five months before reduced sunlight caused energy to become insufficient to keep the lander functioning. The solar-powered robot was not designed to survive through the dark and cold conditions of a Martian arctic winter. However, in case it did, NASA has used Odyssey to listen for the signals that Phoenix would transmit if abundant spring sunshine revived the lander.

Northern Mars will experience its maximum-sunshine day, the summer solstice, on May 12 (Eastern Time; May 13, Universal Time), so the sun will be higher in the sky above Phoenix during the fourth listening campaign than during any of the prior ones. Still, expectations of hearing from the lander remain low.

"To be thorough, we decided to conduct this final session around the time of the summer solstice, during the best thermal and power conditions for Phoenix," said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The Phoenix mission is led by Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at JPL and development partnership with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also manages the Odyssey project in an operational partnership with Lockheed Martin.

NASA to Fund Innovative Museum Exhibits and Planetarium Shows

PASADENA, Calif. -- Innovative planetarium shows and traveling museum exhibits are among nine projects NASA has selected to receive agency funding this year. NASA's Competitive Program for Science Museums and Planetariums will provide $7 million in grants to enhance educational outreach related to space exploration, aeronautics, space science, Earth science and microgravity.

This year's grants to nine informal education providers range from approximately $177,000 to $1.25 million and have a maximum five-year performance period. The projects are located in Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Utah and Washington. The selected projects will work with NASA's Shared Services Center in Mississippi to complete the business review necessary before a NASA award is issued.

"Science centers and planetariums contribute significantly to engaging people of all ages in science, technology, engineering and math," said James Stofan, acting associate administrator for NASA's Office of Education. "NASA wants to give the informal education community access to a variety of agency staff and resources while offering professional development opportunities for informal science educators and encouraging the formation of collaborative partnerships."

The selected organizations will partner with NASA's Museum Alliance, an Internet-based, national network of more than 400 science and nature centers, planetariums, museums, aquariums, zoos and related organizations. The projects will engage the public and educators by providing NASA-inspired space, science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning opportunities.

Flight Readiness Review Under Way at Kennedy

Officials are gathered today at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the agency-level Flight Readiness Review, or FRR, where they'll verify space shuttle Atlantis is ready to fly its STS-132 mission. Afterward, the official launch date will be set. Liftoff currently is targeted for May 14 at 2:20 p.m. EDT. A news conference will follow the conclusion of the review.

Meanwhile, at Kennedy's Launch Pad 39A, technicians continue orbiter aft closeouts and preparations for the upcoming launch countdown, which will begin about three days prior to liftoff.

Inside the fixed-base simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Atlantis' astronauts will practice deorbit preparations while fully suited.

Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn

With the help of amateur astronomers, the composite infrared spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken its first look at a massive blizzard in Saturn's atmosphere. The instrument collected the most detailed data to date of temperatures and gas distribution in that planet's storms.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up loads of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard in this year's Washington, D.C.-area storm front nicknamed "Snowmageddon."

"We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs," said Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Normally, he said, "Data from the storm cell would have been averaged out."

Cassini's radio and plasma wave instrument and imaging cameras have been tracking thunder and lightning storms on Saturn for years in a band around Saturn's mid-latitudes nicknamed "storm alley." But storms can come and go on a time scale of weeks, while Cassini's imaging and spectrometer observations have to be locked in place months in advance.

GOES-15 Opens Its Infrared "Eyes" for First Image

The first GOES-15 full-disk infrared image was from the Imager. The GOES Imager is a multi-channel instrument designed to sense radiant and solar-reflected energy from the Earth.The first full-disk infrared image of the Earth was taken on April 26 at 17:30 UTC (1:30 p.m. EDT).

New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

Leonardo Latched in Discovery Cargo Bay

The Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module was fully latched into space shuttle Discovery's payload bay at 3:15 a.m. EDT Friday. The removal of Leonardo from the International Space Station's Harmony node was delayed several hours the day before, setting the shuttle and station crews sleep shift back an hour later than planned.

Leonardo brought about six tons of material to the station and will return to Earth in Discovery’s cargo bay with about 2.5 tons from the station. Discovery is scheduled to undock from the station a little before 9 a.m. on Saturday.

This is the final roundtrip to the station for the 21-foot-long, 15-foot-diameter Leonardo. Once back on Earth, the module will be reconfigured with increased shielding on the outside for the STS-133 mission in September when it will be left on the station as a permanent module.

Crews Prepare for Final STS-131 Spacewalk, Continue to Unload Leonardo

The Expedition 23 and STS-131 crews got back to work moving equipment and supplies to and from the International Space Station and preparing for Tuesday’s spacewalk, the third and last planned for the shuttle mission.

STS-131 Mission Specialists Rick Mastracchio and Clayton Anderson configured their tools in the Quest airlock. After a review of spacewalk procedures with other crew members, they are again spending the night in the airlock, its pressure reduced to 10.2 psi. That campout is aimed at reducing the nitrogen in their blood to avoid decompression sickness.

The spacewalk, replanned after difficulties bolting down an ammonia coolant tank on Sunday caused some rescheduling, is to begin at 3:11 a.m. EDT Tuesday and last 6½ hours. Activities include finishing the complicated change out of the large ammonia tank assembly, retrieving micrometeoroid shields from outside the airlock and retrieving a light-weight adapter plate assembly.

Mastracchio and Anderson completed the mission’s second spacewalk at 8:56 a.m. Sunday.

The shuttle and station crews continue to unload the Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module and transfer 17,000 pounds of science racks and other supplies into the station.

Global Hawk Completes First Science Flight Over the Pacific 04.08.10

NASA pilots and flight engineers, together with colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have successfully completed the first science flight of the Global Hawk unpiloted aircraft system over the Pacific Ocean. The flight was the first of five scheduled for this month's Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) mission to study atmospheric science over the Pacific and Arctic oceans.

The Global Hawk is a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet (18.3 kilometers) -- roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 11,000 nautical miles (20,000 kilometers) -- half the circumference of Earth. Operators pre-program a flight path, and then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours, staying in contact through satellite and line-of-site communications to the ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.

"The Global Hawk is a revolutionary aircraft for science because of its enormous range and endurance," said Paul Newman, co-mission scientist for GloPac and an atmospheric scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "No other science platform provides this much range and time to sample rapidly evolving atmospheric phenomena. This mission is our first opportunity to demonstrate the unique capabilities of this plane, while gathering atmospheric data in a region that is poorly sampled."

Soyuz TMA-18 is Rolled Out to the Launch Pad

The Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft is rolled out by train to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, March 31, 2010. The launch of the Soyuz spacecraft with Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov, Soyuz commander and Expedition 23 flight engineer, and Mikhail Kornienko, flight engineer; along with NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, flight engineer, is scheduled for 10:04 a.m., April 2, 2010 (Kazakhstan time)

Saturn's small inner moon Mimas

The highest-resolution-yet temperature map and images of Saturn's icy moon Mimas obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal surprising patterns on the surface of the small moon, including unexpected hot regions that resemble "Pac-Man" eating a dot, and striking bands of light and dark in crater walls.

"Other moons usually grab the spotlight, but it turns out Mimas is more bizarre than we thought it was," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It has certainly given us some new puzzles."

Cassini collected the data on Feb. 13, during its closest flyby of the moon, which is marked by an enormous scar called Herschel Crater and resembles the Death Star from "Star Wars."

Scientists working with the composite infrared spectrometer, which mapped Mimas' temperatures, expected smoothly varying temperatures peaking in the early afternoon near the equator. Instead, the warmest region was in the morning, along one edge of the moon's disk, making a sharply defined Pac-Man shape, with temperatures around 92 Kelvin (minus 294 degrees Fahrenheit). The rest of the moon was much colder, around 77 Kelvin (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit). A smaller warm spot - the dot in Pac-Man's mouth - showed up around Herschel, with a temperature around 84 Kelvin (minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit).

The warm spot around Herschel makes sense because tall crater walls (about 5 kilometers, or 3 miles, high) can trap heat inside the crater. But scientists were completely baffled by the sharp, V-shaped pattern.

Shuttle Detector at Heart of Volcano Alert System

As Tim Griffin and his team were working on better ways to detect hazardous gases on the shuttle launch pad, they found out they also could build something to find hazardous gases venting from a volcano.

That means they may be only a short time away from building an early warning system for volcano eruptions -- a system that could give those near an active cone days or more to evacuate to safety.
Tim Griffin works with the mobile leak detector in the back seat of a Costa Rican airplane before a sampling fllight. The shuttle leak detection system used at the launch pads is the size of three refrigerators, but Griffin's team reduced it in size and added automation so it could be mobile.Photo courtesy of Tim Griffin.

NASA’s International Space Station Program Wins Aviation Week Laureate Award

The International Space Station Program has received the 2010 Aviation Week Space Laureate Award. This year’s winners were recognized for extraordinary accomplishments in the aerospace and defense industries.

In announcing the Space Laureate award, Aviation Week noted that the space station, currently orbiting 220 miles above the Earth with a multicultural crew of three on board, is “essentially complete after 25 years of political upheavals, redesigns, technical problems and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

“In 2009, the final major pressurized modules were attached to the orbiting laboratory, and its life support and other systems upgraded to support a full-time crew as large as six,” the announcement continued. “The five partner agencies are working to win funding to operate the station until 2020, and engineers already are recertifying its structure until 2028. It has become the model for international cooperation on future human exploration deeper into the Solar System.”

Jupiter's Storms: Temperatures and Cloud Colors

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The images enable scientists to make the first detailed weather map of the inside of the giant storm system.

One observation illustrated by this image is the correspondence between a warm core within an otherwise cold storm system and the reddest color of the Great Red Spot.

The image on the left was obtained by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile on May 18, 2008. It was taken in the infrared wavelength range of 10.8 microns, which is sensitive to Jupiter's atmospheric temperatures in the 300 to 600 millibar pressure range.

That pressure range is close to the altitude of the white, red and brown aerosols seen in the visible-light image on the right, which was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope on May 15, 2008. These images show the interaction of three of Jupiter's largest storms -- the Great Red Spot and two smaller storms nicknamed Oval BA and Little Red Spot.

Solar 'Conveyor Belt' Predicts Increased Sunspot Activity

Solar physicist David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space flight Center in Huntsville, AL and graduate student Lisa Rightmire of the University of Memphis, TN have been monitoring the sun using the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). They observe a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the sun operating at a faster pace as reported in the March 12th issue of Science.

The current of fire is a conveyor belt-like system called the Meridional Flow which rises to the surface at the sun's equator and spreads out toward the poles where it sinks back into the sun. "Normally it reaches peak speeds of about 20 mph," says Hathaway. "However, in 2004 the speed increased to nearly 30 mph and has remained that fast since."

The faster pace is a revelation because it occurred during the deepest solar minimum in almost 100 years and indications that the next solar cycle will be a weak one. This contradicts some theories that say a fast pace results in increased sunspot production. But it agrees with others that say a fast pace results in decreased sunspot production.

The faster rate of currents on the sun and the expected weaker solar cycle have affects for those of us here on Earth. One affect is the temperature increase of the Earth could slow down, there would be fewer auroras, and to the extent that we depend on satellites, GPS, and cell phones there should be less disruption in service.

Robotics and Departure Preparations for Crew

Expedition 22 Flight Engineer Soichi Noguchi works at a robotic workstation in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station.

The Expedition 22 crew members aboard the International Space Station were busy Thursday with robotics activities and preparations for upcoming spacecraft departures.

Flight Engineers Soichi Noguchi and T.J. Creamer performed a series of checkouts and calibrations on the Kibo laboratory’s newest robotic arm, known as the small fine arm. Once its deployment is complete, the small fine arm will be used on the end of the laboratory’s larger main arm to move small science experiments and pieces of hardware on the Kibo Exposed Facility.

Creamer also had time to work with the 3D Space experiment, which involves distance, writing and illusion exercises designed to test the hypothesis that altered visual perception affects motor control.

Flight Engineer Oleg Kotov packed and transferred unneeded items into ISS Progress 35, which is scheduled to be undocked for a destructive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere next month. He also had time to conduct a variety of scheduled maintenance activities in the Russian segment of the station.

Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Maxim Suraev packed items and made preparations for their departure from the station next week. They are scheduled to undock in the Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft at 4:03 a.m. EDT March 18, with a landing about 3.5 hours later.

Kotov, Creamer and Noguchi will remain on the station to become the Expedition 23 crew, with Kotov taking over as station commander. New crew members Alexander Skvortsov, Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Mikhail Kornienko will launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-18 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 2.

Herschel Finds Possible Life-Enabling Molecules in Space

Data, called a spectrum, showing water and organics in the Orion nebula. The data were taken by the heterodyne instrument for the far infrared, or HIFI, onboard the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission with important participation from NASA.

The Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potentially life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is led by the European Space Agency with important participation from NASA.

The new data, obtained with the telescope's heterodyne instrument for the far infrared -- one of Herschel's three innovative instruments -- demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel will provide on how organic molecules form in space.

The Orion nebula is known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood. By sifting through the pattern of spikes in the new data, called a spectrum, astronomers have identified a few common molecules that are precursors to life-enabling molecules, including water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur oxide and sulfur dioxide.

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by a consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Mission Preparations in Full Swing

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:30:59 PM GMT+0530

Preparations for STS-131, the next mission to the International Space Station, continue today at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as technicians working on space shuttle Discovery at Launch Pad 39A calibrate the inertial measurement unit and test the camera located on the external fuel tank.

At NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Mission Specialists Rick Mastracchio and Clayton Anderson are rehearsing procedures for their first spacewalk of the mission in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. The lab, which resembles a huge swimming pool, simulates as closely as possible on Earth the conditions the astronauts encounter working in the weightlessness of space.

NASA’s International Space Station Program Wins Collier Trophy

The International Space Station is featured in this image photographed by an STS-130 crew member on space shuttle Endeavour after the station and shuttle began their post-undocking relative separation.

The International Space Station Program has won the 2009 Collier Trophy, which is considered the top award in aviation. The National Aeronautic Association bestows the award annually to recognize the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America. “We are honored to receive this prestigious award,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “We're proud of our past achievements to build and operate the space station, and we're excited about the future- there's a new era ahead of potential groundbreaking scientific research aboard the station."

The International Space Station is a joint project of five space agencies and 15 countries that is nearing completion and will mark the 10th anniversary of a continuous human presence in orbit later this year. The largest and most complicated spacecraft ever built, the space station is an international, technological and political achievement that represents the latest step in humankind’s quest to explore and live in space.

Designated as a national laboratory by Congress in the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, the space station provides a research platform that takes advantage of the microgravity conditions 220 miles above the Earth’s surface across a wide variety of fields, including human life sciences, biological science, human physiology, physical and materials science, and Earth and space science. Upon completion of assembly later this year, the station’s crew and its U.S., European, Japanese and Russian laboratory facilities will expand the pace of space-based research to unprecedented levels.

Nearly 150 experiments are currently under way on the station, and more than 400 experiments have been conducted since research began nine years ago. These experiments already are leading to advances in the fight against food poisoning, new methods for delivering medicine to cancer cells and the development of more capable engines and materials for use on Earth and in space.

NASA's Chandra Reveals Origin of Key Cosmic Explosions

New findings from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have provided a major advance in understanding a type of supernova critical for studying the dark energy that astronomers think pervades the universe. The results show mergers of two dense stellar remnants are the likely cause of many of the supernovae that have been used to measure the accelerated expansion of the universe.

These supernovae, called Type 1a, serve as cosmic mile markers to measure expansion of the universe because they can be seen at large distances, and they follow a reliable pattern of brightness. However, until now, scientists have been unsure what actually causes the explosions.

"These are such critical objects in understanding the universe," said Marat Gilfanov of the Max PlanckInstitute for Astrophysics in Germany and lead author of the study that appears in the Feb. 18 edition of the journal Nature. "It was a major embarrassment that we did not know how they worked. Now we are beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions."

Perspective View of Layered Mound in Gale Crater, Mars

This oblique view shows geological layers of rock exposed on a mound inside Gale Crater on Mars. This is a lower portion of the mound, with the crater floor at the left (and lowest) edge of the image. Layers near the bottom of the mound contain clay and sulfate minerals that indicate wet conditions. Overlying rock layers contain sulfates with little or no clay, consistent with these layers forming in an environment in which water was evaporating and Mars was drying out.

This view was created from a three-dimensional topographic model of the mound. The U.S. Geological Survey generated the model from a stereo pair of images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Observations of the site by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, on the same orbiter, yielded information about composition. The vertical dimension is exaggerated three-fold relative to the horizontal dimensions. The view is toward the southeast. The width of the area included in the image is about 1.5 kilometers (about 5,000 feet). The scale bar in the labeled version is 200 meters (656 feet).

Radar Studies Continue in Hispaniola

NASA radar imaging flights over Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are in the second week of a three-week campaign.

The JPL-developed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) is currently in the second week of a three-week campaign in Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Flying beneath the belly of a modified Gulfstream III aircraft from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, the sophisticated radar can spot minute changes in Earth's surface by flying precise repeat passes over targeted areas.

The Central American survey flights are focusing on measuring biomass in Central American rain forests, imaging volcanoes from Guatemala to Costa Rica, and imaging Mayan ruins. The flights over Haiti and the Dominican Republic are targeting earthquake faults on the island of Hispaniola. Scientists collected data over Central American nations again on Feb. 2, and then flew a second set of data tracks over Haiti on Feb. 3 before returning to Costa Rica on Feb. 4.

Envisioning Future Flight

Today's students will be designing tomorrow's aircraft, and NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Student Competition gives them a head start.

Each year, the competition challenges students to research a particular real-world issue in aeronautics and to develop their own solutions to the problem.

Past participants in NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Student Competition said the experience was a rewarding one that helped them learn more about aeronautics and encouraged them to improve their approaches to research and creative problem-solving.

In the 2008-2009 competition, students were challenged to develop ideas for making commercial supersonic air transportation available by 2020. Contest participants did so by examining obstacles to supersonic transportation and proposing solutions. In an additional challenge, some students submitted designs for a small supersonic airliner.

Cassini's Next Look at Titan

Sixteen days after last visiting Saturn's largest moon, NASA's Cassini spacecraft returns for another look-see of the cloud-shrouded moon - this time from on high. The flyby on Thursday, Jan. 28, referred to as "T-66" in the hollowed halls of Cassini operations, will place the spacecraft within 7,490 kilometers (4,654 miles) above the surface during time of closest approach.

While this latest close approach places Cassini more than 6,400 kilometers (3,970 miles) higher above Titan's surface than the Jan. 12 flyby, it should not considered of lesser scientific value. Instead, this high-altitude encounter will provide an opportunity for some of the spacecraft's instruments to gain another unique perspective on this crepuscular world.

First of Many Asteroid Finds

The red dot at the center of this image is the first near-Earth asteroid discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE -- an all-sky mapping infrared mission designed to see all sorts of cosmic objects.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that come close to Earth's path around the sun. This particular asteroid, called 2010 AB78, is roughly one kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter, and is currently about 158 million kilometers (98 million miles) away from Earth. Its elliptical-shaped orbit takes it out beyond Mars and back in about as close to the sun as Earth. Because the asteroid's orbit is tilted relative to the plane of our solar system, astronomers do not think it poses a hazard to our planet. As with all near-Earth objects, 2010 AB78 will continue to be monitored.

The image shows three infrared wavelengths, with red representing the longest wavelength of 12 microns, and green and blue showing 4.6- and 3.4-micron light, respectively. The asteroid appears redder than the rest of the background stars because it is cooler and emits most of its light at longer infrared wavelengths. In visible light, this space rock is very faint and difficult to see.

WISE, which began its all-sky survey on Jan. 14, 2010, is expected to find about one hundred thousand previously undiscovered asteroids in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids. It will also spot millions of new stars and galaxies.

Rover Gives NASA an "Opportunity" to View Interior of Mars

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined a rock called "Marquette Island" from mid-November 2009 until mid-January 2010. Studies of texture and composition suggest that this rock, not much bigger than a basketball, originated deep inside the Martian crust. A crater-digging impact could have excavated the rock and thrown it a long distance, to where Opportunity found it along the rover's long trek across the Meridiani plain toward Endeavour Crater.

This approximately true-color view of Marquette Island comes from combining three exposures that Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam) took through different filters during the rover's 2,117th Martian day, or sol, on Mars (Jan. 6, 2010). On the preceding sol, Opportunity's rock abrasion tool brushed dust out of the circular area where that tool had ground into the rock on sols 2100 and 2103 (Dec. 20 and 23, 2009). The dark circle left by the rock abrasion tool's work is approximately 5 centimeters (2 inches) in diameter.

Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade -- due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean -- 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years --1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 -- as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.

“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."

Endeavour's STS-130 Mission

Commander George Zamka will lead the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Terry Virts will serve as the pilot. Mission Specialists are Nicholas Patrick, Robert Behnken, Stephen Robinson and Kathryn Hire. Virts will be making his first trip to space.

Shuttle Endeavour and its crew will deliver to the space station a third connecting module, the Italian-built Tranquility node and the seven-windowed cupola, which will be used as a control room for robotics. The mission will feature three spacewalks.

Liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is targeted for February 7, 2010, at 4:39 a.m. EST

Solar Scientists Use 'Magnetic Mirror Effect' to Reproduce IBEX Observation

Ever since NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, mission scientists released the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system's edge in particles, solar physicists have been busy revising their models to account for the discovery of a narrow "ribbon" of bright emission that was completely unexpected and not predicted by any model at the time.

Further study by a team of scientists funded through NASA's Heliophysics Guest Investigator program has produced a revised model that explains and closely reproduces the IBEX result by incorporating a single new effect into an existing model. The new effect, put forward by the IBEX team soon after sighting of the ribbon, is that the magnetic field surrounding our solar system—called the local galactic magnetic field—acts like a mirror for the particles that IBEX sees.

Sun Glints Seen from Space Signal Oceans and Lakes

In two new videos from NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, bright flashes of light known as sun glints act as beacons signaling large bodies of water on Earth. These observations give scientists a way to pick out planets beyond our solar system (extrasolar planets) that are likely to have expanses of liquid, and so stand a better chance of having life.

These sun glints are like sunshine glancing off the hood of a car. We can see them reflecting off a smooth surface when we are positioned in just the right way with respect to the sun and the smooth surface. On a planetary scale, only liquids and ice can form a surface smooth enough to produce the effect—land masses are too rough—and the surface must be very large. To stand out against a background of other radiation from a planet, the reflected light must be very bright. We won’t necessarily see glints from every distant planet that has liquids or ice.

“But these sun glints are important because, if we saw an extrasolar planet which had glints that popped up periodically, we would know that we were seeing lakes, oceans or other large bodies of liquid, such as water,” says Drake Deming, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Deming is the deputy principal investigator who leads the team that works on the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh) part of Deep Impact’s extended mission, called EPOXI. “And if we found large bodies of water on a distant planet, we would become much more optimistic about finding life.”

One of EPOCh’s goals is to observe the Earth from far away—in this case, about 11 million miles away—so that we know what an Earth-like planet would look like when viewed from our spacecraft. The images in these videos were collected when the spacecraft was close enough to resolve some of Earth’s features, but at the same time, Earth could be treated as a very distant, single point. “This allows us to properly simulate what we would have observed if Earth were an extrasolar planet,” says Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for EPOXI.

Massive Black Hole Implicated in Stellar Destruction

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Magellan telescopes suggest that a dense stellar remnant has been ripped apart by a black hole a thousand times as massive as the Sun. If confirmed, this discovery would be a cosmic double play: it would be strong evidence for an intermediate mass black hole, which has been a hotly debated topic, and would mark the first time such a black hole has been caught tearing a star apart.

This scenario is based on Chandra observations, which revealed an unusually luminous source of X-rays in a dense cluster of old stars, and optical observations that showed a peculiar mix of elements associated with the X-ray emission. Taken together, a case can be made that the X-ray emission is produced by debris from a disrupted white dwarf star that is heated as it falls towards a massive black hole. The optical emission comes from debris further out that is illuminated by these X-rays.

The intensity of the X-ray emission places the source in the "ultraluminous X-ray source" or ULX category, meaning that it is more luminous than any known stellar X-ray source, but less luminous than the bright X-ray sources (active galactic nuclei) associated with supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies. The nature of ULXs is a mystery, but one suggestion is that some ULXs are black holes with masses between about a hundred and several thousand times that of the Sun, a range intermediate between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes located in the nuclei of galaxies.

GOES-K, later renamed GOES-10

NOAA anticipated the end of GOES-10 several months ahead of time, and began deactivating GOES-10 on December 1 when it fired the spacecraft’s thrusters moving the satellite into a higher orbit above the Earth. On December 2, NOAA finished its third and final, firing putting it safely out of commission and put it in an unused drift orbit.

GOES-10 was originally planned for a five-year mission when it was launched in April 1997. It was positioned as NOAA’s GOES-West satellite, more than 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. In 2006 a newer satellite, GOES-11, replaced GOES-10. NOAA then repositioned GOES-10 to support hurricane forecasting efforts in South America. NOAA anticipates moving GOES-12 to provide coverage for South America by May 2010.

"GOES-10 has served America – and other nations – admirably and well beyond its expected lifespan," said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. "The success of GOES-10, built by Space Systems/Loral, was a credit to a large team of NOAA staff, who acquired and managed the spacecraft and processed and distributed the data to users." Kicza added that with the help of its partners, including NASA, "NOAA is creating better satellites that will provide better data that improve our understanding – and prediction – of climate and weather."

Suzaku Finds "Fossil" Fireballs from Supernovae

In the supernova remnant W49B, Suzaku found another fossil fireball. It detected X-rays produced when heavily ionized iron atoms recapture an electron. This view combines infrared images from the ground (red, green) with X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Cassini Spacecraft to Monitor North Pole on Titan

Though there are no plans to investigate whether Saturn's moon Titan has a Santa Claus, NASA's Cassini will zoom close to Titan's north pole this weekend.

The flyby, which brings Cassini to within about 960 kilometers (600 miles) of the Titan surface at 82 degrees north latitude, will take place the evening of Dec. 27 Pacific time, or shortly after midnight Universal Time on Dec. 28.

The encounter will enable scientists to gather more detail on how the lake-dotted north polar region of Titan changes with the seasons. Scientists will be using high-resolution radar to scan the large and numerous lakes in the north polar region for shape-shifting in size and depth. The ion and neutral mass spectrometer team will take baseline measurements of the atmosphere to compare with the moon's south polar region when Cassini flies by that area on Jan. 12. Cassini will also be collecting images for a mosaic of a bright region called Adiri, where the Huygens probe landed nearly five years ago.